kindly accept my refusal
to attend your most excellent party
that would no doubt give me great pleasure
any other time
but there is a tempest sky to watch
and a prairie to receive her cyclone fumes
an unrepeated house
leaning into the coils of an eddying rush
and I unrepentant
leaning with it
exacting my brain
to breathe
but I am sure your martinis are lovely
KarenHansonPercy
They are out
the egrets and the herons–
the egrets with their marauding span of wings;
gentle titans of the sky.
The herons with their dull, cobalt ells
long, thin elbow-ells nodding to the undercooked clouds;
they are out
the lowland birds
red and blue and yellow pinafores flitting colors from the wires,
calling songs from their grasses;
they are out
the unguarded horses of daybreak
running fencelines,
giddy with the advent of a meal;
they are out
the father’s morning voice
sighing words to the small boy as they gather eggs,
smelling like honey and fodder and earth…
KarenHansonPercy
The both of us.
The trees in the prairie creek beds
are not like bears
who wake up from winter
stretching and groaning and groggy
with their bad breath and heavy, sluggish movement.
They are not like people—
asthmatic after a bout with the flu; healing, but never coming back as strong as they were.
Winter makes us older.
Yet through the brittle battle of cold and wind–
the trees who stand there quietly
hosting their cocooned birds of prey
and doling out sincerity
are growing younger.
The cottonwood, oak, the birch, the cypress and dogwood–
all into their emerald magnificence each spring
as if it is a normal matter to gain more youth
and be delivered into one’s prime
again and again, year after year.
The prairie trees never age—
their green is green each Eastertide
inversely screaming youth with the voices of
adolescent boys
in the bodies of women.
Their fists are in the air and they go to war
and they consign and keep house in concert.
There is nothing more perpetual,
more fresh, more new or puerile
than the prospect of a prairie tree rising.
–KarenHansonPercy
They are a gift I have wanted again.
Wanted: One moment in mountains
when winter got so cold
the oil froze before it could burn.
I chopped ferns of hoarfrost from all the windows
and peered up at pines, a wedding cake
by a baker gone mad. Swirls by the thousand
shimmered above me until a cloud
lumbered over a ridge,
bringing the heavier white of more flurries.
I believed, I believed, I believed
it would last, that when you went out
to test the black ice or to dig out a Volkswagon
filled with rich women, you’d return
and we’d sputter like oil,
match after match, warm in the making.
Wisconsin’s flat farmland never approved:
I hid in cornfields far into October,
listening to music that whirled from my thumbprint.
When sunset played havoc with bright leaves of alders,
I never mentioned longing or fear.
I crouched like a good refugee in brown creeks
and forgot why Autumn is harder than Spring.
But snug on the western slope of that mountain
I’d accept every terror, break open seals
to release love’s headwaters to unhurried sunlight.
Weren’t we Big Hearts? Through some trick of silver
we held one another, believing each motion the real one,
ah, lover, why were dark sources bundled up
in our eyes? Each owned an agate,
marbled with anguish, a heart or its echo,
we hardly knew. Lips touching lips,
did that break my horizon
as much as those horses broke my belief?
You drove off and I walked the old road,
scolding the doubles that wanted so much.
The chestnut mare whinnied a cloud into scrub pine.
In a windless corner of a corral,
four horses fit like puzzle pieces.
Their dark eyes and lashes defined by the white.
The colt kicked his hind, loped from the fence.
The mares and a stallion galloped behind,
lifting and leaping, finding each other
in full accord with the earth and their bodies.
No harm ever touched them once they cut loose,
snorting at flurries falling again.
How little our chances for feeling ourselves.
They vanished so quickly—one flick of a tail.
Where do their mountains and moments begin?
I stood a long time in sharpening wind.
By, Roberta Hill Whiteman
is the glory of expression (Walt Whitman)
I liked my tray ceilings
and coffee tables covered in tabloids
I liked my drifting darting eyes
Googling how to live
Godhelpme
I crooked my fingers permanently
tapping buttons to speak
when you should have heard my voice.
I would have felt your body through the phone
if it saved me some time.
“Again I reply to the triple winds
running chromatic fifths of derision
outside my my window:
Play louder.
You will not succeed. I am
bound more to my sentences
the more you batter at me
to follow you.
And the wind,
as before, fingers perfectly
its derisive music.”
(William Carlos Williams)
